Welcome to DARIA: Denver Art Review, Inquiry, and Analysis, a publication devoted to art writing and criticism focused on the Denver-area visual art scene. DARIA seeks to promote diverse voices and artists while fostering critical dialogue around art.
Since 1986, Emanuel Martinez’s mural titled Arte Mestiza has greeted visitors to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Last year, a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts enabled Martinez to restore and protect the work. Freely available to the public, this significant mural reminds us of the contributions of Spanish, Indigenous, Mexican, and Mexican Americans to the stories we tell about the histories of art.
Orisons perforates a now vacant central-pivot irrigation and former cattle field. The fallow plot is labeled “unfarmable” on the artwork website but it’s one of many parcels in North America’s highest, and the world’s largest, alpine valley that may produce crops in the right circumstances. The region’s endorheic (closed) basin is critical for retaining water and equilibrating via evaporation. Deep wells have so far sustained agriculture. But twenty-three years of climate change-induced aridification and megadrought worsened by over-pumped aquifers and invariant farming have left this region dry and sere. It is from this narrative that Humeau builds Orisons.
If you too have grown weary of the painters who play uninspired poker with Pantone color chips, then Frank Martinez’s collection of paintings at Space Gallery might shine some light onto your winter blues. Modern Love glows with a playful curiosity about life’s colorful offerings.
Every piece in Taiko Chandler’s exhibition Thoughtful Intuition at the Littleton Museum, from her paper sculptures to her monotypes, contains shapes and textures that conjure the sea and its creatures. Viewing these works, I felt as though I’d been pulled underwater into the artist’s world, one that’s teeming with longing and magic. But the unexpected gift of this exhibition is the care and detail with which the artist describes her process and the meaning behind her creations.
The Longmont Museum exhibition AgriCULTURE: Art Inspired by the Land pairs artists with local Boulder County farms to create artworks. The exhibition attempts to wield art to connect humanity to the land. This is a tricky tightrope to walk, with the perils of being too didactic or making art that is only illustrative and not substantive on either side. The work presented in AgriCULTURE does a good job walking that tightrope, melding formal elements, materials, and subject matter to create pleasing artworks that maintain a tie to the overarching theme. There is often tenderness apparent in the connection between artist and farmer, as one might hope to achieve when we work in community.
The University of Colorado Art Museum’s Faculty Exhibition: 2023 brings together works by twenty-three CU Boulder faculty members. The media represented in the show include ceramics, film, multimedia installations, painting, photography, and sculpture, among others. Each artist tells stories through their work about time and experience becoming tangible in their art making practice. It is through their stories that we see how students will begin to tell their own.
Located on the second floor of the historic McNichols Building in downtown Denver, Community Cloth, a contemporary exhibition of textile, fiber, and fashion design art curated by Shanna Shelby, invites viewers to engage with “tangible” and “tactile” art forms. As the introductory title card in the exhibition states: “While a sculptor creates in a very tactile manner, a viewer of the final artwork is not typically expected to handle the sculpture. Fiber art, on the other hand, is best experienced not only through sight but also through contact; fabric, rugs, clothing, and upholstery are meant to be touched as well as seen.”
Sama Alshaibi’s solo exhibition Silsila is currently on view at the Hatton Gallery at Colorado State University (CSU) and is presented in conjunction with the Center for Fine Art Photography and the CSU Center for Environmental Justice as part of the Environmental Justice Thru the Arts exhibition series. Part of her larger project also titled Silsila, Alshaibi creates photographs and videos of performances, explorations, and documentations of her journey through fifteen predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Maldives nation of islands in Southeast Asia between 2009 and 2016.
I want to invoke metaphors of geological time to describe the sense of temporality invoked by Martha Russo’s exhibition at the Ent Center for the Arts. Apart from the pandemic-related interruptions that delayed its possibility, the nature of the work itself is accumulative, labor and time-intensive. With this exhibition—titled caesura, on view until December 2— the Gallery of Contemporary Art (GOCA) proves itself as a site committed to advancing what could be possible in the arts in Colorado Springs.
The Arvada Center’s three newest exhibitions explore the history, traditions, and aesthetic of the San Luis Valley, affectionately known as the Valley. In the Main Gallery, Emilio Lobato’s retrospective A Mi Manera: A 40-Year Survey encompasses the Valley native’s innovation and numerous stylistic changes. Meanwhile, two group exhibitions, Latitude 37°: Art of Southern Colorado and Colcha Embroidery of the San Luis Valley, embody the region’s influence and relationship to colonialism and hybridity, respectively.
Currently on view at the Parker Arts, Culture & Events Center until November 12, 2023 is a solo exhibition of work by Sarah Fukami entitled Reflections on Amache. From cut Plexiglas® to lithography, and personal documents to government archives, Fukami uses a variety of media to layer her family’s history and the immigrant experience as Japanese Americans living during World War II.
In collaboration with Nicole Banowetz, Access Gallery artists DILLPhoenix, Heather H., Jareth J. Charles, and Skylar K. have created an installation of soft sculptures brimming with textural delight and dynamic colors. Abstract fiber forms inspired by a variety of natural organisms activate the entire space from floor to ceiling. Alongside the installation titled It’s a Wrap, two community projects offer generative tactile experiences as outlets for people who have been affected by bullying.
Cabell has always worked with re-purposed materials in a subversion of human consumption and waste, while Bailey focuses on conservation education through photography. Though the artists work in markedly divergent mediums, these shared interests became connective points. With Light Contrasting with Dark, their second collaborative exhibition at the Artists on Santa Fe gallery in Denver, Bailey and Cabell have honed their artistic relationship, generating unexpectedly cohesive works that are as natural as their subject matter.
An open, curious approach to material and a long-term commitment to process emerge as the conceptual through-lines of Colorado Women to Watch, currently on view at MSU’s Center for Visual Art (CVA). Curated by CVA director Cecily Cullen, the exhibition brings together five well-established, female-identifying artists: Kim Dickey, Ana María Hernando, Maia Ruth Lee, Suchitra Mattai, and Senga Nengudi.
You could call Rachel Denny’s Wild and Precious exhibition at Visions West Contemporary romantic. After all, her textile sculptures include a frolicking fawn, a soaring bird, grazing sheep, and a hopping rabbit. But if you look closer, you’ll see that the sculptures, which take their inspiration from taxidermied animals, have dark undercurrents that stem from man’s conflicted relationship with nature.
Intricate flowing systems that mingle, connect, and divide from one another exist in everything that moves. Imagine the rooting systems of plants, the complex network of river systems, and the jutting flashes of lightning as they find their way to the earth. These complicated structures scaffold how we think, move, and comprehend the world around us through the consciousness that constructs the pathways of our neurons. The artist Katie Caron plays on this dynamism of the neuron and nature’s unconscious geometric patterns in her new exhibition Neuron Forest at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder.
Last Chance Module Array (2015-2016), iterations four and five in M12 Studio’s Prairie Module series created with Onix Architects from Groningen, the Netherlands, stands halfway between Denver and the Kansas state border as a lone, contemporary monument.
For the month of September, Lindsey Bell has curated two solo exhibitions in her Denver gallery Bell Projects by artists Jamie Gray (in the front gallery) and Jon Sargent (in Bell Project’s Living Room gallery). Gray’s High Desert Homecoming and Sargent’s Nude Masculine States together share the common theme of nature.
This Fiber Art International exhibition at the Museum of Art Fort Collins praises the handmade and the materiality of objects, revealing that many artists still enjoy interacting physically with their work. Although AI-generated artwork isn’t likely to disappear, it seems that neither is fiber art. The strong relationship between artists and objects is profoundly felt and impacts their selection of materials and concepts, ranging from the macro to the micro, demonstrating that art can be made from anything.
Clyfford Still Museum presents Abstract Expressions, a terrace installation by composer Nathan Hall and Denver Botanic Gardens assistant curator and horticulturist Kevin Phillip Williams. Not since the museum’s opening in 2011 have the terraces been revamped and reimagined, so the change is a welcome one. The new installation invites viewers to enjoy the second-level outdoor spaces with a multisensory experience of soundscapes and regionally relevant gardens inspired by the life and art of abstract expressionist Clyfford Still.
